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23andMe Blunder: Genome scan customers sent the wrong results
- acangiano 16y agoThe company should try to prevent this from ever happening again, that's for sure, but mistakes, even serious ones, happen everywhere. For example, hospitals mix up babies far too frequently (as mentioned in the article). Further regulation is not what's needed. In my opinion, 23andme remains an awesome service and one that shows we're "living in the future", so to speak.
- rokhayakebe 16y agoThank you. I feel like there is a group of internauts who have their hand on the keyboard just waiting for any company to make a mistake just so they can start writing hurtful comments.
- johnswamps 16y agoI wonder if the error was due to the huge increase in orders they must have gotten after their 80% off sale a month and half ago?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- WesleyJohnson 16y agoI ordered during this time frame, but waited quite some time before sending in my sample. Here's hoping my results won't be affected when I get them.
- clistctrl 16y agoI ordered mine during the sale.
- aheilbut 16y agoIt sounded like the problem affected one 96-well plate. I doubt that it was directly related to the increase in volume. This sort of mix-up can happen very easily - for example, if you load a plate into a machine backwards. They (or rather, their contract lab) need to have better processes and internal controls to catch such errors.
- mkramlich 16y agoThat explains the promotion jingle: "80% discount, 80% chance of getting your own genome!"
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bcl 16y agoI find it somewhat silly that on finding out her son didn't match her first though was that he had been switched, rather than that there was an error in the testing. Which is more likely to happen?
- kalid 16y agoI think people may be likely to think that "DNA evidence" is rock solid.
- tomjen3 16y agoIf the hospital had had a case of baby switching just prior it sounds much more likely that they also had a bunch of cases that were never solved. But the switched DNA results actually scare me more: I wonder how many innocent people have been convicted based on DNA evidence that only happened because some labrat switched a bunch of vials around?